disinfecting corals

[Baldy]

Hello all,

I had another thread going regarding maintaining an ich free dt and asked a question that didn't get answered.

For those of you that are anal about hypoing new fish to maintain no ich, how do you disinfect new coral additions. Ich could make it in with the frag and hypoing corals isnt an option. Do you have a qt with good lighting and water params for corals?

[daniella3d]

I replied to your other thread about this. I personally use Revive and avoid putting any bag water into my tank.

[Madreefer]

http://www.jlaquatics.com/product/md-crx001/Coral+Rx+One+Shot+Coral+Dip.html

[Baldy]

Do these products work well enough to put that much faith in when go to such great lengths to keep ich out?

[George]

None of proven marine ich killing medicine/method is coral safe (well, except tank transfer but that is a different topic), i.e. they will kill your coral.
If you are serious about keeping ich or any parasites out of your DT, the best method is to set up a frag tank. QT your coral and invert in your frag tank, no fish. Fish should be QT'd in a separate tank.

[daniella3d]

I buy a lot of corals, and I only do this treatment after acclimatation, then I remove the coral from the treatment water and up in the tank. I never had any problem with ick doing this.

I think it would be a very rare occurence to get ick from a coral after such treatment. I have confidence enough that I don't quarantine my corals and I am a paranoid about quarantine. Revive even kill flatworms and red bugs, so I would be very surprised if any parasite could survive this. Also avoiding putting the bag water in the tank is also limiting this.


Do these products work well enough to put that much faith in when go to such great lengths to keep ich out?

[asylumdown]

#1 thing you can do, as others have mentioned, is to not allow a single drop of outside water in to your system. This should eliminate the tomite and pro-tomont stages which are active in the water column. What you need to be most worried about beyond that is somehow introducing tomonts, which are like tiny little ticking time bombs ready to explode and infect your system.

Luckily, Cryptocaryon irritans doesn't encyst on coral tissue, algae, or soft substrate, so one way to make sure the corals aren't a vector of infection is to break SPS off any rock/plug/base they came on, and re-attach them to something you know is sterile. LPS skeletons that you can't remove could theoretically be a site of tomont encystment, but when you think about the biology of the parasite, they usually drop off the fish in the middle of the night when they're in their favourite sleeping spot, drop to the sand bed, then crawl around for a few hours before they encyst. Biologically, they do this so that they're near where fish will likely be sleeping when they excyst and send up the infective free swimming stages (also in the middle of the night). As awful as the parasite is, the free swimming stage isn't the best swimmer and it only has a few hours of viability before it runs out of the energy it needs to penetrate the fish's skin, so they seem to hedge their bets by dropping from the fish and hatching from cysts when the fish are closest to the substrate.

Basically, this means that you'd need to be really unlucky to pick up an LPS whose skeleton was harbouring encysted C. irritans tomonts, as they're not the preferred substrate, or usually near where the tomonts are dropping off the fish. It's not impossible, and I for one would never take an LPS coral from a system that was clearly and visibly heavily infested with ich, but the only way to guarantee something that could theoretically harbour tomonts isn't harboring them, would be to quarantine it for as long as you would fallow a tank, which is anywhere from 6-9 weeks depending on who you ask.

That's not something most people will do, so another thing you could do is take any LPS with exposed stony skeletons, then using a toothbrush and a bucket of tank water scrub the exposed skeleton really well to try and dislodge any tomonts that might be attached and rinse it really well with tank water before putting it in. I've also found myself taking a toothbrush dipped in concentrated bleach and gently washed the exposed skeleton, which I'm sure people will think I'm crazy for, but if the skeleton is shaped right and you're careful you can avoid getting any of it on the tissue. In my case, I did it because the skeleton was covered in what looked like a really nasty algae that I didn't want in my tank, but it would work for ich tomonts as well.

I'm not sure if any of the dips that are available for corals are known to have any effectiveness against C. irritans tomonts, if they're present. I've read pretty much every piece of published scientific literature there is on it, and the only things that consistently and reliably destroys ich tomonts will also kill any coral you might have. The only things that are known to destroy tomonts, or at least render them incapable of producing infective tomites are:

- 24 hours at 40 degrees C
- Complete drying for 24 hours. In the study that tested this method, drying for 1 hour wasn't enough to kill 100% of the late stage tomonts, but 24 hours did
- Concentrated chlorine solution (bleach) for one hour, though I'm sure at undiluted strength it would kill them much faster, the study only looked at it in 1 and 24 hour intervals.
- A fresh water bath lasting several days, though some studies have found that even after a fresh water bath, some tomonts can continue on to produce infective tomites when the salinity is returned to normal, so even that isn't 100% (this likely has more to do with the variant of crypt you're dealing with than anything)

So basically, you can eliminate all the free swimmers simply by not letting in any outside water, but the tomonts are much harder to exclude.

ETA: I think formalin can also destroy tomonts at the right concentration, but in any case, the concentration will be way higher than a coral can handle

[Baldy]

WOW! thank you very much for taking the time to type that out. you have helped me way more than i thought this thread would!!!